PwC has released a report called “Will robots steal our jobs?” It’s not the first report on the subject and it certainly won’t be the last. But coming from the world’s second-largest professional services firm, it deserves attention. (Disclosure: PwC is an occasional client of mine.) As you’d expect, the report offers a thorough and […]

European consumers are not into self-driving cars as much as carmakers and Silicon Valley giants would like them to be, but the UK’s enthusiasm offers a glimpse of hope. According to City A.M., a global survey of 22,000 people by consultancy Deloitte revealed the continent’s sentiment regarding autonomous vehicle—finding that consumers in France, Belgium, Germany and Italy have […]

One out of ten London tech companies report to have lost funding following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in June 2016, according to a survey from Tech London Advocates. The group, which champions the capital’s technology sector, interviewed 220 of its members— including founders and “senior figures within London’s tech sector”— regarding the […]

Alphabet-owned AI powerhouse DeepMind is looking to work with the UK’s National Grid to help Britain radically reduce its energy consumption. Last July, the London-based company employed AI-fuelled optimisation to slash down electricity use at Google’s data centres by 15 percent: after training a neural network to forecast future cooling requirements, it managed to reduce the amount of energy […]

Google’s bot-detecting technology reCAPTCHA is going invisible. The system, used by millions of websites across the Web, is used to recognise human users and filter out automated web crawlers; its interface is familiar to whoever has surfed the Internet in the last decade: it can variably ask users to make sense of slightly warped words or numbers, to […]

AI no longer belongs to the realm of science fiction. From voice recognition to self driving cars and medical diagnosis, ‘artificial intelligence’ has, in just the last few years, woven its way into our lives at work and at home. Part of this step change is due to the evolution of AI from the domain […]

Japanese carmaker Nissan unleashed its self-driving vehicle—a modified Leaf electric car— on the streets of London in its first European test. The Tokyo-based company’s robotic car debuted on Monday following negotiations with regulators and the police. The car can travel at up to 80 km per hour, and shift from manned to autonomous mode at the flick of a […]

The UK is about to start a review of the impact of artificial intelligence on the country’s economy. The review, which is part of Whitehall’s new Digital Strategy, will be carried out by University of Southampton’s computer science professor Wendy Hall, and the CEO of artificial intelligence startup BenevolentAI, Jerome Pesenti. According to WIRED UK, the review will […]

Jigsaw, the Alphabet subsidiary focused on geopolitical challenges, has released an new tool that uses machine learning to identify and flag up toxic comments online. In a Medium post published on Thursday, Jared Cohen —Jigsaw’s President and a former US Department of State operative— said that online conversations on controversial topics are marred by name-calling, hate speech and generally toxic […]

Beginning in October, new EU regulations will require manufacturers to fit all cars produced for sale in the European Economic Area with a device that, when it detects a crash, automatically requests emergency services and transmits data about the location of the vehicle, the direction it had been travelling in, and the time of the […]